Posted
by
ScuttleMonkey
on Monday January 08, 2007 @02:48PM
from the no-comment dept.

smooth wombat writes "In the final conclusion to John Gilmore's fight to be able to fly on an airplane without providing identification, the United States Supreme Court, without comment, let stand an appeals court ruling which said that Gilmore's rights are not violated by being required to show proof of identity. Gilmore had argued that without being able to see the law which says one must provide identification before being allowed to board a plane, there is no way to know if the regulations call for impermissible searches."

So sorry. We can't show you that piece of legislation. It's a matter of national security.

That's because there is no "legislation" that says you must show ID. The legislation, in effect, is "the TSA can set guidelines for security in airports." The TSA, in turn, has security directives, some of which are secret because they pertain to security procedures and processes which they don't want people who would intend to circumvent them knowing about. Further, it's already been determined several times over the course of this that you can fly without ID [slashdot.org] if you submit to the standard "intensive" search that anyone pulled out of line gets. I fully realize some people will still think that's unacceptable, but the point is that you can fly without ID with the standard "intensive" search.

The airlines love this "security measure" because it solves a business problem for them. Prior to this it was common to be able to buy tickets for cheap on the secondary market. Now that market does not exist.

The travel guide I was given by my travel agent for my tour through China said Chinese regional airlines would *refuse* baggage that wasn't locked... they can't guarantee it's security from theft otherwise.

Note that the Supreme Court denied the petition for a writ of certiorari - fancy talk for "they decided not to hear the case". Their rules state that if any four (out of nine) justices vote in favor of granting the writ, the court will hear the case.

What this means is that the court decided by a vote of at least 6-3 not to hear the case. In many cases, though, this has less to do with the factual merits of the case than it does the fact that there is no conflict among lower federal courts on the issue.

On another note, I always thought that they had a good idea when they considered arming the pilots themselves. When you realize that 95% of airline pilots are ex-military, it seemed a good compromise. Never could understand why it failed...

It failed because a majority of the pilots got together, said guns on an aircraft was a colossaly stuipid idea, and refused to implement it.

And how are the flightdeck crew supposed to take a leak or get food on a 11+ hour flight ?

Armored the skins and ports of commercial aircraft against small arms

That's not really needed. You can punch a lot of small holes in a plane before decompression becomes a problem. And between the time that the first hole is created and the time it would become a problem, the pilot can declare an emergency and descend to a safe altitude that does not require compression. Hell, I spend a lot of time at 15,000 feet above ground level with no oxygen or compression in the plane.

Issued small arms to any adult passenger that didn't have same at boarding

That's just a HORRIBLE idea. Untrained armed people are far more likely to kill innocent people than hijackers!

The other issue you don't address is emotional blackmail. You have to be able to communicate with the cockpit in case the cabin crew need to declare an emergency to the pilot. This same communication system could be used to tell the pilot that you will kill everyone on board or blow up the plane if he doesn't follow your instructions. How do any of your solutions (besides the one where grandma kills everyone in a turban with her newly issued cannon just because they look like a terrorist or a furrin devil) address this issue ?